Stuart High School Bands

Doug Martin, director

Newsletters

SEPTEMBER 2009

Old newsletters:

Welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl
Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston
Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would
not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated.
I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and
math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an
engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician.
I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to
apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On
some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the
value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they
listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really
clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit,
because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and
entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind
your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever
to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of
entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it
works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the
ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said
that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin.
Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable,
permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of
relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has
a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts
and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside
us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the
Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier
Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the
war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of
1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a
concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him
paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in
the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen
wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was
performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in
the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in
the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration
camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy
writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good
day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to
escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the
camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t
just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why?
Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the
bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be,
somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without
hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect,
but they were not without art.
Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an
unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in
which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning
I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship
to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to
practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit,
without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and
opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off
the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t
this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what
happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent,
pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment
in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the
journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that
day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to
play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the
day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble.
We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t
shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized
activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People
sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall
Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first
organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later
that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The
first organized public expression of grief, our first communal
response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the
beginning of a sense that life might go on.
The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the
arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is
not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would
have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from
leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass
time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the
ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways
in which we express feelings when we have no
words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we
can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful
piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then
some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied
the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you
know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to
crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over
sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our
conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way
a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was
absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music,
there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was
some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings
—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s
some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and
someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music
is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40
percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple
of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks.
Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of
ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we
feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching
Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no
music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right
moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at
exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie
with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The
Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between
invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important
concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than
a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that
I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed
playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St.
Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music
critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most
important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in
Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist.
We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was
written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of
Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we
often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play
rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this
case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to
talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and
play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near
the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later
met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his
buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a
good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd
that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of
that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard
crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the
piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided
to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the
circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its
dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience
became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly
figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I
was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was
hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open,
but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine
gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute
from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean,
realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many
years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory
returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I
didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you
came out to explain that this piece of music was written to
commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle.
How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those
memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships
between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most
important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier
and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect
their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn
his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman
class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I
will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student
practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously
because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going
to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save
their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to
walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a
heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary.
Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you
do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a
musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used
Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a
firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of
therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor,
physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if
they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with
ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master
music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of
wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of
mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it
will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no
longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which
together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If
there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an
understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit
together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s
what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11,
the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our
internal, invisible lives.”

Doug Martin, Director

3301 Peace Valley Lane
Falls Church, VA 22044
(703) 824-3971
www.raiderband.org

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